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The Piano Incident
©Eric Hoeppner 2000
I received an e-mail from a friend wanting me to drive
his pop-up camper from Newnan's Lake in Gainesville to the Folk Festival in White Springs. He knew I had a trailer hitch and
enough horsepower to handle the load. What follows is my reply to his request:
Hey Ed,
Let me tell you
about my times hauling a trailer.
A friend called me to ask if I could haul a piano, an upright player piano. I
told him that I did not have a trailer Tommy said that his wife's dad had an old second hand U-Haul we could use. I proceeded
over to Max Crebs's house to pick up the trailer. As I pulled in I saw Max raking a pile of old oak leaves out of an old U-haul
trailer, At one time it had been bright orange with the Big U in the side and a white sturdy steel pipe railing around the
top of the open trailer. Now it was a faded orange, top railing still had remnants of white paint. When I went over to the
trailer, Max asked me if I had the right size ball. Right size ball? Do they come in different sizes, I thought. I said, "I
guess, I can't find a size number on it any place, I found it on the side of the road one day when riding my bike, I bought
a nut at the Discount Auto Parts store and screwed it on the bumper hitch that came with my van.
"Never used
the hitch for anything except a sort of trailer made out of a boat trailer with 2x6 wood decking bolted across the frame.
I used it to haul some cut logs a mile or so to the house on a back road, going 15 MPH. Oh yeah, one time I hauled some canoes
on a trailer, they blew off on the interstate. What a traffic backup that was."
Back to the piano. So we get
the trailer hooked up, safety chains fastened and lights working. I give the hitch a pull and it did not come off. I must
have the right size ball.
Off I go to meet Tommy and load the Piano. He had it outside the place he bought it,
waiting to be loaded. But first a tune. He had a roll of player music loaded in and cranked up. The paper scrolling past,
the keys playing something that sounded like it came from the chase scene from an old western silent movie. Even I could tell
the piano was way out of tune.
We got it in the trailer. Those things are heavy. Being so heavy we decided that
the piano would not blow out so there was no reason to tie it down. We were not going to be going very far and it fit with
only a foot of extra room at the back of the trailer, so off we went.
You know when you have a big upright player
piano in a little open topped U-Haul, and you glance in your rear-view mirror, It is like you are being followed way too close
by some one driving a piano. I had just gotten up to speed as I passed a "speeding fines doubled" sign. I started
looking for the road construction. As I looked in the rear view mirror, there was that tail-gating piano again. I was beginning
to get used to the idea of being followed by a piano. That is when I crossed over an unfilled section of road. They had just
put in a new water pipe and not paved the shallow ditch yet.
After the bump, I glanced in the rear view. That
tail-gating piano had dropped back some, which was a nice gesture in a construction zone. Wait a minute! If that trailer was
not keeping up with me, it must be unhitched. I started applying the brakes, hoping to let the trailer catch up with me. I
must have over-braked. I could see that the piano had shifted toward the back of the trailer and was keeping the hitch up
in the air, as it passed me on my left.
The lady in the on-coming car saw it too, in her lane. She swerved off
the road as the trailer bounced off the side of her car and came back into my lane. Now I was following the piano in the old
U-Haul.
It was playing. Evidently the bump had started the roll Tommy had put in before we left. I was not sure
what to do, so I followed. The old second hand U-haul rolling down the road with an upright player piano, playing chase music
form an old movie. Me following in a big Dodge van, passing the lady with the crashed in side, her car stopping off the side
of the road. That U-haul kept going for almost the whole roll of music. It finally came to rest as it ripped out a telephone
junction box and several hundred phone lines.
The U-haul stopped, the bashed car stopped, the Doge van stopped,
the phone service stopped, the piano playing the last few notes, in slow speed, stopped. The paper work was just about to
begin. Thanks
Ada Thats as true as it gets
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